Berkeley Welcomes Record Number of MBAs in for Class of 2020
Last week, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business unveiled stats for the incoming students that comprise its full-time MBA Class of 2020.
With 291 full-time MBA students (along with 276 evening and weekend students), the Berkeley Class of 2020 is larger than any before.
The new class one of the most academically accomplished in school history. Average GPA for this year’s first-year class is 3.66, off just .05 from last year’s. But an increase in average GMAT offset the tiny backslide in GPA. At 726, it moved up one point higher than last year’s incoming class.
In terms of professional experience, Haas students come from various backgrounds. About a quarter of the students come from the consulting industry, and another 20 percent come from banking/financial services backgrounds. The industries drawing the third-, fourth-, and fifth-most Haas grads are high tech (10 percent), nonprofit (9 percent), and healthcare/pharmaceutical/bio (7 percent). In addition, 5 percent of the incoming class has military experience.
The percentage of women in Haas’s incoming class is also up over the previous year, something we’ve also seen this year at Northwestern’s Kellogg School, Duke’s Fuqua School, and USC Marshall, among others.
About 43 percent of the incoming Berkeley Class of full-time MBAs are women—a 3 percent increase. International students from 30 countries make up around 34 percent of the class, down from 39 percent last year. Here, too, Haas is not alone. Many U.S. schools have shared, in both in published class profiles and informal conversations, that international application volume was down, or at best, flat year over year.
Former Haas Dean Richard Lyons stepped down in June after 11 years with the school, a role in which he raised more money than any prior dean and oversaw the construction of Connie & Kevin Chou Hall. The addition of the new building helped make it possible to expand the Haas class, an effort Lyons championed. He and other supporters viewed it as a way to help ensure that Haas has enough graduates to command attention from the world’s top recruiters without compromising the intimacy and culture.
“Part of the reputation of the school is a function of its scale, and there are times where you are just not at the right reputational scale. You’re too small,” he explained in a 2017 interview with Clear Admit.
“It’s a super intimate experience—there’s no question about that—but target companies want to go to a place where there are enough people graduating that they can send a team of recruiters, for example. If you are too small you are below the threshold.”
Ann Harrison, a renowned economist and member of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, will serve as Haas’s next dean. Harrison begins her term on January 1, 2019. Professor Laura Tyson, the current interim dean since Lyons left, returns to her prior faculty positions next year.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from Clear Admit.
Berkeley Haas Celebrates 8 Years of Defining Leadership Principles
If you want to get a feel for the culture of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, look no further than its four Defining Leadership Principles (DLPs): Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself.
Introduced eight years ago, the DLPs have become a part of the fabric of the school. In fact, 75 percent of students from all three MBA programs and the undergraduate program cite them as a major reason they chose to attend. Not only that, 90 percent of Haas alumni surveyed from the past decade report being familiar with them and using them to navigate both their professional and personal lives. Earlier this month, as part of Haas Culture Day, the school celebrated the DLPs’ eighth birthday, complete with cupcakes.
In an interview with the Haas Newsroom, Dean Rich Lyons talked about the impact the principles he helped introduce have had on the school. “I’d say that we are seeing stronger data every year that the DLPs are affecting what we really care about. For example, we have clear data on how the Defining Leadership Principles are helping us win yield battles (i.e., when students choose Haas over other schools they’ve been admitted to). The DLPs are also motivating our donors. Alumni awareness of the principles is way up, and their engagement based on them is way up.”
To build on these successes, the school has launched a new initiative, the Haas Culture and Leadership Fund, designed to further extend the reach and impact of the DLPs even after Lyons steps down as dean to return to the faculty at the end of this academic year. Among other things, money from the fund will enhance culture-focused content in the curriculum; financial aid, awards, and research support for students and faculty who exemplify the DLPs; and support existing centers and institutes that uphold the principles.
Dean Lyons has a difficult time choosing which DLP most resonates with him. “It has always been hard for me to look at them as anything but a ‘system’ taken all together,” he said. “The one principle that still seems like it sets us apart the most externally versus our top competition is Confidence Without Attitude. But for me personally, the one resonating the most right now is Beyond Yourself. There’s so much in that one that it’s inexhaustible.”
Haas also reached out to its community to find out which DLP they preferred. See what they had to say in the video shared below.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from our sister site, Clear Admit.
New Haas Center Seeks to Tackle Gender, Equity, and Leadership Head On
As one headline after another alleges sexual harassment against women by men in power from Hollywood to Congress, the launch earlier this month UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business of a new Center for Gender, Equity, and Leadership (CGEL) seems more timely than ever. In fact, the idea for the center significantly predated the current media firestorm—and while its scope will certainly include sexual harassment, it will be significantly wider—addressing issues ranging from the persistent gender pay gap to inadequate maternity leave to the fact that currently only 5.6 percent of CEOs at S&P 500 companies are women.
Since 2014, Kellie McElhaney has been teaching a course at Haas called “The Business Case for Investing in Women.” Regularly over-subscribed, the immensely popular class won McElhaney, an associate adjunct professor at Haas, the Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching. Students in the class were eager for data demonstrating that companies with greater numbers of women in leadership have higher share prices and better returns on equity and investment than companies with fewer women. In fact, so too were companies. And McElhaney delivered.
Together in a 2016 study with Genevieve Smith of the International Center for Research on Women’s advisory practice, McElhaney zeroed in on how Gap Inc. has managed to achieve pay equity at the like-for-like level and equal pay at the organizational level through its company culture, practices, and policies. The relationships that helped spur that research also led the Gap Foundation to become a founding corporate donor of the new center—contributing part of the $1.9 million McElhaney has raised to date, which also includes gifts from alumni and friends. With an ultimate fundraising goal of $10 million, McElhaney hopes CGEL will bring together leaders from many backgrounds to help advance gender and diversity in policy and business, engage male and female allies and people of all ethnicities, races, and classes around a shared goal of gender and diversity, and develop business leaders who view gender as a spectrum rather than a binary construct.
“The idea for the center has been percolating for years,” McElhaney tells Clear Admit. “We had kind of a scatterplot of things happening at Haas before, but no over-arching strategy.” In addition to McElhaney’s own research and teaching, several other Haas professors have been contributing to growing scholarship on gender, equity, and leadership. Professor Laura Tyson’s research and writing has examined how gender equity works around the globe—including how it is associated with better education and health, higher per capita income, faster and more inclusive growth, and greater international competitiveness. Currently faculty director of the Haas Institute for Business & Social Impact, Tyson will form part of the leadership team of CGEL. Professor Laura Kray, who studies gender stereotyping and negotiations, rounds out the inaugural CGEL leadership team.
“The first mission of the center will be to serve as a hub for all the things that have already been happening in pockets all over Haas,” says McElhaney. “There are already courses on power, race, gender, equity,” she explains. “In earnest, we thought to ourselves, ‘Let’s look at all that is happening here around these issues. Wouldn’t it be more effective if we could bring it all together, see what we are doing, and see where we might benefit from going long and deep?”
“At Berkeley, you can build anything—but it has to be funded first,” explains McElhaney. Encouraged by Dean Richard Lyons, she set out to raise $1 million by July 2017 as a proof of concept. In June, CGEL had garnered $1.2 million in funds. In addition to corporate funding from Gap, McElhaney also wooed significant gifts from several high-net-worth individuals through a series of strategic luncheons focused on looking at the world vis-à-vis gender equity. “A dozen individuals gave money right away, and now we’re heavy into the corporate funding component,” she explains.
Expanded Faculty Research, Policy Impact, Radical Fierce Ally-ship
Beyond continued fundraising, McElhaney intends to start 2018 with content and substance—with CGEL serving as a hub for new in-depth faculty research, corporate collaboration, conferences, training sessions, and the development of new courses related to gender, equity, and leadership. In addition to McElhaney’s own work documenting the business case for gender equity, several other Haas professors have also been engaged in pathbreaking research. For example, Professor Clayton Critcher has studied the multiple negative consequences of concealing one’s sexual orientation at work; CGEL leadership team member Kray’s recent work examines how fixed beliefs about gender roles preserve the status quo; and Professor Jennifer Chatman has helped reveal how political correctness in the workplace reduces uncertainty in relationships, encouraging greater creativity by both men and women.
Another point of focus for CGEL will be on the intersection between policy and business. “We want to bring together political and business leaders to look at the things on the political agenda that are moving us backward and how we prioritize them,” McElhaney says, offering pay data transparency and mandatory maternity leave as two examples. “We need to bring business voices into the political fold.”
Developing “radical fierce allies” will be another key priority for the center, she continues. “Men need to come to the table in terms of being ambassadors, but so, too, do women,” McElhaney stresses. “As a white woman, I am earning 80.5 cents on the dollar compared to my male counterpoints, but if I were an African-American woman, that would be 60 cents.” The center will host strategically curated salons to talk about all of these issues, drawing together women of all races, classes, and gender identities to talk about how all women need to be better allies for one another.
CGEL’s Time Is Now
Dean Lyons notes that center’s launch is well timed. “The majority of CEOs include gender equity among their Top 10 priorities, yet boardrooms and C-suites are not changing quickly enough,” he on the Haas website. “While the commitment to diversity and an inclusive work environment is there, too few have a handle on solutions. Our new center will work toward immediate change in these areas and pave the way for future generations.”
McElhaney agrees. “We have a ton of traction, and the appetite is so high for this,” she says. But not only are they hitting it at the right time, but also at the right place, which is Haas. “We have just the right mix of ingredients that other schools can’t claim,” she says. “While other schools are focusing more on diversity or counting the heads, we are focused comprehensively on inclusion in our classrooms—through our cases, our choice of course speakers, our faculty teaching methodology, and our student culture.”
CGEL’s launch will help ensure that Haas students hear about gender, equity, and leadership in every class. “This is a new center that puts on the map that this is something we care about,” she says. “We graduate 100 leaders every year—and going forward we are going to graduate 100 diversity fluent leaders. I think we are uniquely positioned to become a talisman of all things equity.”
Learn more about Haas’s new Center for Gender, Equity and Leadership.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from Clear Admit.
Gabelli Faculty Return To School With New Consortium Knowledge
At the Fordham University Gabelli School of Business in New York City, the professors never stop learning. When summer rolls around, instead of taking a break, some go on to further their education—bringing it back to their students come fall.
Three Gabelli professors attended the Aspen Undergraduate Business Education Consortium at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Business school professors Miguel Alzola, Julita Haber, and Kelly Ulto went to the two-day consortium to learn how to integrate business and the liberal arts. Faculty from about 40 other colleges and universities joined the event.
The consortium sought to show how business education can help students “make sense of the world and their place in it while preparing them to engage responsibly with the life of their times,” according to a press release.
Guest speakers included Harvard Professor Mihir Desai and Haas School Dean Richard Lyons. Lyons spoke about the role of educators for future generations. Vice President of Apple Joel Podolny presented at the consortium too. He explained how a company “can stay true to its vision,” per the press release.
The three faculty members plan to bring this knowledge back to their students this coming school year. Gabelli MBA candidates and undergraduate students alike will learn the value of mixing business with the liberal arts.
